Soothes

I’m in Soda Hall now, supposedly studying for the practice prelim I’ll be taking tomorrow (administered by some older, wiser grad students) in preparation for the real thing next week. In reality though, I’ve been following three nail-biting games on ESPN GameCast: the Sox won 2-1, the As won 2-0 in the 12th inning, and Seattle pulled off an 11-8 win in the 11th. Baseball is exciting — at least if you’re following three games at once :).

I’ve been realizing how music-starved I’ve become recently. I can’t listen to music when I’m trying to concentrate really hard. So it’s great for coding or writing papers but not good for studying. Unfortunately, all I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks is studying (or thinking hard about problems for Ras). So the music part of my brain (roughly 70%, it seems) is withering away. I actually find myself longing for CDs these days. So I seize every opportunity I can to listen… in fact I was about to close my laptop so that I could stop reloading ESPN et al. five times a minute, but I decided to update my LJ just so I could keep listening. (And, for the record, the Powderfinger album has ended and I’m currently listening to the Sneaker Pimps’s Becoming X.) Can’t wait till I start coding again!

I want to write a Boggle program that generates and prints out valid boards and all the words you could make from those boards — so that you could play a round and then see how you stacked up against the optimal score. This project is, of course, scheduled for sometime A.P. :).

I managed to play guitar once this weekend, and while recording a song snippet (that I may post later), I started playing around with Cool Edit’s multitrack abilities. They have like 1500 samples available online, so I started poring through them. I made a quick song (40 seconds) from about 10 of the samples: Fun Song. Of course, it’s not mine, as naturally I didn’t write any of the loops, but it’s still pretty cool that you can get a nice sounding song with just some good software and raw materials.

Okay, time to really study (and split infinitives) now.